Kelly Bayer Rosmarin: From Silicon Valley to Corporate Australia

The Optus boss credits her time in Silicon Valley with giving her an “innovation mindset” that has served her well in corporate Australia.

Concentrate on the things that will make a real difference

2020-present

CEO, Optus

“I’m an impatient perfectionist. I just want to go faster and do more and fix everything at once. But when you’re leading a large organisation, you have to be crystal clear on what’s going to move the dial, what’s a priority and in what order we need to do things. That means knowing that certain things aren’t perfect and choosing not to do anything about them because there are more important priorities. I try to push myself and my team to focus our attention on things that will make a difference. One of the behaviours that we’ve introduced is listen to learn. If you can listen and be open – really hear everything that’s going on around you from all sources – you can learn a tremendous amount and apply those learnings in a novel and unexpected way.

Nothing really beats uniting people behind the purpose and one of the first things I did at Optus was launch an enduring, timeless purpose for the company. Our purpose is to power optimism with options. Optimism comes from having choices. I think it’s made a big difference to the people and if you have a strong culture with high engagement, it does lead to the right business outcomes.”

A good transition is everything

2019-2020

Deputy CEO, Optus

“To have a year to learn the industry, understand what’s driving the culture of the company and formulate a new strategy before I was in the [CEO] chair was an enormous privilege. I think a lot of companies could learn a lesson from that. There are very few opportunities where someone with a fresh perspective as an outsider can take the time to do the learning and have a good transition period. I feel very grateful that I had that because who would’ve known that the pandemic would come and I’d spend my first day running a critical infrastructure company the whole country was relying on from the spare bedroom in my home? If I hadn’t had that year to get to know the people and the culture, to be ready to go, it would’ve been a very different experience.”

Influence comes in many forms

2013-2018

Group executive, Institutional Banking and Markets,

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

“I’d become really good at getting things done in the bank and a lot of that was through informal influence. I knew how to find all the people who had the right capability, inspire and motivate them, then do a lot of things under the radar. But the minute I became a group executive I couldn’t do anything under the radar. If I went to a different group, they’d want to tell their group executive. Everything had to be officially sanctioned. It was like I lost a bit of a superpower. Obviously you gain a lot in exchange because you can influence at the top table but it did mean that I had to adapt my style quite a bit. I had to take on more of a coaching and mentoring role and give advice to people as to how they could get things done. I could teach others how to navigate and gain that informal influence.”

Innovate at scale

2003-2012

Executive general manager, Corporate Banking Solutions,

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

General manager, Business Development,

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

“What I enjoyed most at the bank is that I could bring the innovation mindset and creativity I had in Silicon Valley and start applying it in a banking context. When you’re in a startup, you innovate and get your wonderful product but then there’s a problem. Who is going to sell it, how are you going to get it to your customers and how do you get your name out? At the bank you come up with a new product and you’ve already got a whole bunch of branches and business bankers and people who are going to sell it. When you need a legal opinion, there’s someone sitting a floor or two away from you. It might be slow and bureaucratic and you’ve got to convince people along the way but no innovation is easy. I learnt how to innovate at scale in a large company and I loved that.”

Be smart about communication

2002-2003

Consultant, The Boston Consulting Group

“One of the things BCG teaches is to lead with your conclusion and then provide the supporting backup. It’s so tempting to build a case and keep the conclusion at the end but it’s a far less effective way if you’re trying to build consensus. People’s natural instinct is to criticise, criticise, criticise and disagree at the end. If you give them the big statement at the beginning, they might disagree but then you use the facts to persuade them and they’ve got time for it to sink in. You’ve also got to get the right buy-in – you should never be walking into a room to give people information that’s important in a cold way. They were huge lessons in the power of communication and how that matters in getting ideas heard, understood, supported, bought into and then brought to life.”

Focus on people above all else

2000-2002

Director CRM sales, Product Management & Strategy,

PeopleSoft/ Oracle

“We sold ourselves to PeopleSoft, after Chapter Eleven. So pitching to PeopleSoft was one of the most intense moments of my career. But when I joined PeopleSoft, I really enjoyed it. It was extremely people-oriented. The core values of the company were all very soft and fluffy and I’ll never forget a new CEO coming in and adding ‘intensity’ and ‘competitiveness’ to the values. The company all but rejected these new values and it was a good lesson for me in how teams can achieve great things together. People matter the most – you can’t take a culture and just will it to change. You’ve got to start with what’s common and congruent; you can’t simply take new values that are incompatible with the current values then shove them on top of the culture and think it’s going to work. That was fascinating for me.”

Understand that cycles are just that

1998-2000

Corporate development, Calico Commerce

“I joined Calico when it was a startup and stayed all the way through, from having one of the top 10 IPOs in 1999 until we sold ourselves out to Chapter Eleven. It was an unbeatable experience to see a company go through an entire life cycle in an intense, short period of time. I learnt a huge amount. When things are going down, there are real consequences to every decision that you make. It gave me a strong sense of how everything is connected and how end-to-end thinking makes a big difference – if you pull this lever here, it has consequences over there. I also got an understanding and belief in cycles. When things go up, they come down. But when they’re down, they will come back again. Later in my career, when we were going through the GFC, I felt very calm and knew that it wouldn’t last forever.”